I hear dumb people

Okay, let's vent.

Latest on the hit parade of Stupid Participant Tricks at work: Bitching Because Nobody Notified You Your Claim Was Denied.

Here's how that goes:
.

STUPID PARTICIPANT: Uh... hi... yeah... I sent in a... a... reimbursement... thing...

ME: A claim?

STUPID PARTICIPANT: Yeah, a reimbursement claim, that's it... for my 2005 account... back in... I don't know... August...

ME: [keyboard clicking briskly] I show we received a claim from you on December 12, 2005.

STUPID PARTICIPANT: Yeah, okay, that's when I sent it... I... um... well... I haven't received any payment or... heard anything and... I... well... [trails off vaguely]

ME: [click click click click] Ah. Okay. Your claim was denied.

STUPID PARTICIPANT: What? But... but WHY?

ME: [continuing to click away] I'm checking, one second please... ah. Here we go. You failed to sign the claim form.

OR

ME: You failed to submit any documentation with your claim form.

OR

ME: You failed to submit a claim form with your documentation.

OR

ME: Your documentation was insufficient, your employer does not accept canceled checks as sufficient proof of payment.

Or, etc, etc, etc

STUPID PARTICIPANT: Well, I'm sure I signed the claim form/I know I sent in a claim form/I know I sent in my documentation/Last year I didn't have to sign my claim form/send in a claim form/submit any documentation/canceled checks were fine!

ME: I sincerely apologize, but I'm looking at the file you submitted and there is no claim form/the signature line at the bottom of the claim form is blank/we only received your claim form without anything further/if your claim was processed erroneously last year I am sorry but you will need to submit a properly filled out claim form and acceptable documentation this year.

STUPID PARTICIPANT [realizing he/she is beaten, switching tracks] Okay, but I am very upset that I was not notified about this. I sent in this claim form back in August!

ME: ...December...

STUPID PARTICIPANT: ...and I've been sitting here waiting for my check and nobody got in touch with me, I was not notified that there were errors in my submission, this is MY money, why didn't anyone tell me this?

ME: I apologize, sir/madam. Our processing department normally notifies participants via email of any denial codes.

STUPID PARTICIPANT: Well I didn't get any email! I'm very upset about this! I'm very displeased! This is terrible service! WHY WASN'T I NOTIFIED OF THIS?

ME: I'm very sorry you didn't receive our emailed notice of denial, sir/ma'am. If you will send in a signed claim form/acceptable documentation for your claim, we will be happy to reprocess it.

STUPID PARTICIPANT: Well, how long will THAT take?


Okay, folks, gather 'round. Although I cannot explain this to participants on the phone bluntly enough to get it through their slope browed slackjawed pinheads, because that would be bad customer service, I'm going to lay it all out for you here.

(1) You can call us before you submit your claim form and ask us questions about how to fill it out, and what documentation is acceptable to your employer. People do it. All the time. And we will look it all up and tell you whether your employer requires Explanations of Benefits, whether they will accept a canceled check as proof of payment for dependent care, and we will remind you, generally, to sign your claim form. If you don't want to be bothered because you're sure that something as simple as filing your claim for reimbursement from your tax free health care account, which is regulated by the IRS, whose rules never ever ever change, is a piece of cake and you know the drill perfectly, well, that's on you, bitch.

(2) You can call us a few days after you fax your claim in, or a week or so after you mail it, just to make sure we got it and that all the pages are there. This is a GOOD idea. Wise people do it often.

If, on the other hand, you stuff your claim form into your fax machine and/or mailbox and then don't bother to follow up on it for several months, well, you're an idiot. As you have so cogently noted, over and over again, it's YOUR money.

Now, as to specifically why we do not make more than a token effort (emails of notification) to advise you when your claim is denied, well --

(a) We don't have time and it isn't our job. I take calls all day. On a slow day I may occasionally have two minutes between calls, once in a while. I never have time to make outgoing calls, and my supervisor never authorizes me time off the queue to make outgoing calls. If my supervisor authorized other reps to take time off the queue to make outgoing calls, those of us dealing with the proportionally increased call volume would wait until our first break rolled around, and then we would lynch the bitch.

The claims processing department doesn't take calls, and they don't have time to make calls telling you your claim has been denied, either. Why? Because although it is impossible for you to emotionally accept or believe this, YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PARTICIPANT IN AN FSA AND YOUR CLAIM IS NOT THE ONLY ONE HERE. We have literally millions of claims sitting in queues over in the processing department. Our processors have a certain (high) quota of claims they have to get through every day, or they get fired. And that's just how that works.

(b) We wouldn't want to call you and tell you your claim was denied, even if we had time. Why? Because you're a bunch of stupid sulky whiney pissy baby-brats and you'll argue with us about it and we don't need it. It's very annoying to have you tell us over and over again that we can't do this (we can) and it's your money (it isn't; you put it aside in a tax free account and you don't get it back until you jump through all the hoops and you signed a piece of paper when you set up the account acknowledging that and if you don't like it, here's a fucking concept, just PAY YOUR GODDAM TAXES AND SHUT THE HELL UP, BITCH) and last year you didn't have to do any of this you submitted your claim exactly the same way as this year and it went through no problem (we don't care, it doesn't matter, this year you will do it the right way or you will not get paid, dickhead).

We don't want to have to point out to you where in the papers you were given when you signed up for the FSA it says you have to submit EOBs, or it explains about effective and termination dates on the account, and we couldn't, anyway, because we aren't participants in your FSA and we didn't get those papers and we haven't read the fuckers and it isn't our responsibility to, we didn't sign them, YOU DID, dimwit.

We don't want to have to point out where on our website it tells you that sandwiches at Panera Bread are not eligible for reimbursement regardless of how healthy and vitamin fortified they are, because it's a very complex website and anyway you're a moron, and it causes us a great deal of stress to constantly have to throttle down on the impulse to actually tell you you're a moron, which is like this throbbing drumbeat of anguished rage in our temples constantly while we're on the phone with you. And one of these days we're just going to snap and even if that doesn't result, eventually, in the SWAT team putting a bullet in the back of our heads as we hold our hugely overweight team leader in front of us as a kinda-human shield while spraying spittle all over the place as we hysterically shriek demands no one will ever listen to, it will still definitely result in us losing our jobs, and that's a bummer, so, no, at the very end of it all, we wouldn't call you even if we had the time, because talking to you dumbass people is annoying enough when you call US, it's not like we're going to initiate the process.

And if this isn't enough, then there's

(c) The simple truth: if you don't get any notification regarding the status of your claim, eventually, you are going to call and ask us. It is invariable, irrefutable, and axiomatic. This is, after all, YOUR money, and you want it, and while you may be stupid enough to sit around with your thumb up your ass for two or three or six or even twelve months (I kid you not, I got that call) after you fax or mail in a claim representing hundreds or even thousands of dollars that you earned last year and had deducted from your paycheck, eventually, if you don't hear anything from us, you WILL call us. That system works. It works every time.

Or maybe it doesn't. I suppose there may be people out there who open Flexible Spending Accounts, file one claim a year representing the entire balance, get that claim denied, and never ever check up on it. I wouldn't know; it's very hard to demonstrate a hypothesis in the absence of all data, and, well, it's very difficult for me to believe that there are people out there who are that goddam stupid. (However, there are people who vote Republican and people who send money to televangelists, so I suppose anything is possible.)

But, if there are such people, then their employer loves them, because Flexible Spending Accounts are use it or lose it accounts, and if you don't use up your money by the time the claim year closes, it is forfeit to your employer.

And... guess what? We work for your employer, not for you. They have no interest in making it any easier than they need to for you to get this money, and therefore, we have no real interest in doing it, either.

Oh, yeah, while I'm venting: saying "I don't think I'm going to do this FSA thing next year, this is too much trouble" is fine, but if you expect it to motivate us to go above and beyond and provide you with extra special super duper customer service (which seems to mean, set aside all the rules just for you and pay out your claim anyway even though it consists entirely of a piece of grocery bag you scrawled 'I bought a special support mattress please give me $2000' on in crayon), well, trust me when I say, when that call is over with, we laugh hysterically at your stupidity and tell everyone in all the cubicles around us about it and they laugh hysterically at your stupidity too. And then that night they tell their significant others about it over supper and their significant others laugh at your stupidity, also. And then some of us even blog about it.

Here's the haps: we don't care if you use an FSA next year. No, I take that back; we care deeply in that we hope you don't. Seriously. Because you're a dumb ass whiney pissy baby brat, and if you don't use the FSA next year, we won't have to deal with you.

Which brings me to what may be the hardest part of my current job: empathy. See, in the call centers where I worked before, I was dealing with Post Office customers, and Sprint long distance customers. Now, everyone is a post office customer, and mail is very important. And anyone can have Sprint long distance; it's not like it's a reflection on your character that you chose Sprint instead of one of several other largely interchangeable and pretty much identical long distance carriers for your telecommunications needs.

So when these people have problems, I can empathize, and do my best to help them out, provided they aren't being complete fucking tools to me on the phone.

But with the customer class I'm dealing with now, well, it's different. People with Flexible Spending Accounts are, for the most part, pretty well off. They have decent jobs that offer decent benefits, or they wouldn't have the FSA in the first place. And, let's face it, the only reason they're doing this in the first place, and putting up with all the hassle, is that someone told them they could get a break on their taxes by doing it, and they thought that was a pretty good idea. So, add it up: these are affluent people with good benefits who are actively trying to avoid paying their taxes. To say the least, my sympathy level does not start out high for them.

Now, if one of them calls me up and they're nice and pleasant, that's fine. I like to help people, I'll do my best to help anyone who isn't a complete dillhole to me -- even if their problem is that they hired an au pere to watch their kid, and the au pere doesn't want to give them their tax I.D. number to put down on the dependent care claim, and can't I do something? (I can't; they need to hire an au pere who is willing to comply with the laws of the nation where she works. But I won't get snotty with them, I'll just explain that as kindly as I can.)

But the slope is steeper for these people. They hit me with the slightest riff of entitlement, the tiniest whiff of attitude, the most minute particle of bitchiness, and that's it, they get nothin'. I am not inclined to like these people anyway. After all, they could just pay their goddam taxes, like the rest of us.

And now for something completely different

Swing wide the halls of reason
Let truth be e’er in play
Though fools and rogues cry treason
And lead lesser wills astray
when faith’s drummer beats its caisson
and all hope’s a dwindling ray
Swing wide the halls of reason!
Let no man say you nay!

Somebody else's problem

A guy I used to game with had a knack for colorful phrases… or maybe he just repeated stuff he heard on Saturday Night Live, I don’t know; at that time in my life I didn’t own a TV (one big reason that, to me, Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo are still ‘the new guys’ on SNL).

One of the things my gaming buddy used to say a lot, when we’d be talking about various political issues or social difficulties, was “Well, that would be… somebody else’s problem, right?”

Then he’d laugh. Sometimes I would too. Mean spirited selfishness is funny; we’ve known that since Laurel & Hardy, and certainly shows like Seinfeld have driven the point home well in the last decade or so.

But let’s pause and look at that phrase a little bit longer.

Somebody else’s problem.

It’s a common impulse. We all have problems of our own, and our perception is, nobody is helping us with them, right? We have to solve our own problems, it’s something that’s expected of mature adults in our society, so why shouldn’t other people be able to solve theirs? Why should somebody else’s problems become ours?

“God doesn’t give anyone a challenge they can’t handle.” That’s something else I’ve heard from various sources throughout the course of my life. And it fits right into the Somebody Else’s Problem philosophy. If we assume the universe is an orderly place, kept well in hand by a Divine Being who acts as a completely fair referee to all living creatures, it makes things so much easier. We see someone struggling under some enormous burden – a birth defect, a crippling injury, a debilitating disease, ignorance, or just plain straight up poverty – and we comfort ourselves with the notion that whatever problems Somebody Else may have, God, that great wonderful guy in the zebra-striped shirt in the sky, has also given that same Somebody Else the resources to successfully deal with it.

Man, I’d love to live in that world. That’s the world of the family sitcom or comedy drama from the 1950s through the 1970s, a world where every issue, every problem, every challenge, every difficulty that arises is simple enough to be successfully resolved, once and for all time, in 22 or 44 minutes, right before the credits roll. Where every conundrum can be magically worked out simply by being honest with whoever the show’s authority figure is, or by asking that same authority figure for help when you need it. Where you can always tell the bad people from the good people and the wise folks from the fools, often simply by checking their wardrobes.

I suspect we’d all love to live in that world. There’s no racial strife there, at least, not for longer than a single episode which ends (like all episodes) with everyone hugging. That’s the world where every kid is happy except for momentary bouts of gloom caused by minor deviations from mainstream behavior. It’s a world where nearly every parent, every teacher, every cop, every fireman, every government official, is wise and strong and courageous and loving. Everyone there is well intentioned and has a good heart. Even the mean people and the bullies can be redeemed with a little bit of love and positive attention. Nobody is sick for very long, nobody is crippled, nobody is even ugly (hell, very few people are non-white, for that matter), and everybody that does have a problem that can’t be neatly solved (like the very rare person with a disability who only shows up for the obligatory Let’s Be Sensitive To People With Disabilities episode) is darned cheerful about it, too. God. They’re SO brave.

Of course, what these Father Knows Best trips to fantasy land really tell us, if we pay attention, is that the secret to creating a social paradise is a very simple one – neuter everyone. This, apparently, is the price of that perfect world from a bygone TV era – nobody ever has sex with anyone, at all. At most, in the steamier shows that only come on after 9 pm when little Biff and baby Kathy are in bed, people make out a little. I’m not sure that’s the lesson that the producers of 7th Heaven and The Partridge Family were really trying to impart, but it’s certainly implicit in pretty much every minute of such programs’ screen time. A world without sex is, apparently, Utopia. Of course, you’re going to run out of kids in twenty years or so, and out of humans entirely in a century, and I have to assume the suicide rate is nearly as high as the Prozac count in nearly every perfect family’s medicine cabinet… but these are small sacrifices to make on the road to Shangri La, right?

Regardless of our desires, however, we can’t live in that happy Golden Age of Television fantasy land. Here in what we mostly sane folks more or less agree is actual reality, that sweet little homily about God only giving us problems we have the strength to handle is a gigantic load of horseshit. God gives people problems they can’t handle all the time. God hands out crippling and disfiguring injuries and diseases like a schoolyard pusher passing around free dimebags to new customers. God has seen fit to create and maintain a world in which every living being needs to eat to continue to live, and eat well to continue to live well, and, amazingly enough, a great many people in the world… I’m not talking dozens or hundreds or thousands here, I mean, millions of them, a whopping percentage of which are children… can’t do the former, and millions more can’t do the latter. To say that God doesn’t give anyone a problem they don’t have the ability to handle on their own is, at best, myopic chuckleheadedness, and at worst, deliberately cultivated cruelty. The world sucks, most people are damaged goods, many of them right out of the womb… they simply cannot help themselves. Their difficulties, their issues, their defects, their challenges become, by definition, Somebody Else’s Problem.

I will, however, indulge in one perhaps overly optimistic, sweet sounding homily – Every living being has something to offer to the universe. Everyone, no matter how depraved or vile or seemingly trivial or unimportant, has some kind of gift, some kind of talent, something unique about them that, if they could find it, and it could be properly cultivated, could be employed to make the world a better place. I really believe that, and I suppose that makes me a sap, but it’s one reason why I believe that Somebody Else’s Problem… is, in fact, Everybody Else’s Problem.

Because when we help people solve the problems they can’t solve themselves… then they have the ability to turn around and help us solve the problems that we can’t solve.

It’s important to understand, when dealing with Somebody Else’s Problem Syndrome, that we are rarely that honest in describing it. That’s why it’s a funny joke; it’s one of those things we all think, but hardly ever say out loud. When we actually talk about our reluctance to help strangers who mean little or nothing to us, in person or through our taxes, we use ringing phrases like self sufficiency, and self reliance, and independence, and we speak in Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne cadences as we remark on 'looking after one's own' and 'taking care of yourself' and 'carrying your own water'. We claim a proud and lofty disdain for all outside aid, generally referring to such as 'goddam interference' and ‘no good guv’mint charity’ and to those who would proffer such distasteful largesse as 'lousy socialist busybodies'.

Under the wonderful American Frontier rhetoric, though, it’s all still Somebody Else's Problem. The flip side of self reliance is xenophobia; the dark mirror image of independence is isolationism. And thus we can see that the essential underlying principle we are speaking of here is not merely 'carrying your own water' or 'I can make it on my own', but also 'I don't care about you' and ‘Fuck off, buddy’.

Somewhere in the background, very faintly, Bruce Hornsby softly croons “Just to be funny he says, ‘get a job’…”

The reality of the world is, many people… I’d say most, in fact, I’m very tempted to say ‘all’… have problems they themselves cannot solve. Yearning for a simpler, happier place, where all children are healthy and happy, people have jobs they like where they make enough money to support their families and maintain a strapping bank account, everyone knows their place and nobody squabbles about race or religion or sexual harassment, it's sunny in the summer and it always snows at Christmas, people smile and nod on the streets, all entertainment is wholesome, we all leave our doors unlocked and there are aromatic pies cooling on every windowsill, everything is decent and proper and nobody gets any diseases worse than a cold, or has any medical conditions more serious than tonsilitis or an ailing appendix... well, certainly, longing for such a wonderland, and wishing mightily that we could live there, and not in the fucked up, stressed out, screwed over, imperfect, unjust, often hateful world we all actually have to inhabit... that's natural enough.

But out in the imperfect world we are all actually stuck with... hell, I don't know. Maybe this self reliance thing can work, for some people. Maybe there are folks out there who really do 'take care of their own' and who really don't need any 'interfering busybodies' to help them out. If these people exist, I for one admire the gumbo out of them. These fine men and women of true independent spirit are an inspiration to us all. They live their lives wild and free, carrying their own water, proud and independent, and never ever ask for anyone else’s help with anything. These guys have never once in their lives called their landlord, a plumber, an electrician, or an HVAC guy. They’ve never filed an insurance claim or a police report. They’ve never sought care from a medical professional, dialed 911, cashed a paycheck or used an ATM card, logged onto the Internet, eaten in a restaurant, or had food delivered to the house. They probably don’t watch TV, but if they did, it would be a television they built their damn selves, blowing the glass for all the tubes in their own basements out of sand they carted in from their own beaches, cutting down the trees from their own forests to make the wood for the cabinet, mining and refining the ore and then smelting the metals for the circuitry. And they do all this in a house they built themselves, after digging their own basement with either their own two hands, a hoe they made out of a stick and a piece of sharp rock, or a bulldozer they built using that same home made backyard assembly line-factory they're going to put into their basement and make TVs with once they get the basement dug in the first place.

Honest to Jesus, these people amaze me. They raise their own cattle, milk them, slaughter them, and skin them; cut their own meat and tan their own leather. They build their own automobiles and refine their own petroleum products from the output of the fully functional oil well in their side lots. They only drive on roads they themselves have surveyed, cleared, graded, and paved, and they damn well lay their own sidewalks, too. That cup they’re drinking from? They threw it and baked it their damn selves with their own wheel and kiln. That fluid they’re imbibing with such relish? Whatever it is, they made it themselves, presumably, or at least dug the well and installed the pump. These are some impressive motherfuckers, I tell you this in truth.

If you’re not one of these wonderful people… and if you are, for God’s sake, send me an email, just as soon as you get done building your own computer and making your own fiber optic cable and setting up your own Internet browsing software from scratch… then you pretty much have to fess ‘up. Admit it – however much we may wish otherwise, this whole self reliance thing really doesn't work. Whether we like it or not, we live amidst a vast and intricate social fabric, where most of the threads have a purpose. They do things for us we find useful or desirable, and, presumably, we do things back that they find equally practical or pleasant. That's how it works. We help each other get through the day, every day, and if we didn't, none of us would make it very far.

Somebody Else's Problem? Given how other-reliant we all are in our day to day lives, we can now see this exposed for the hypocrisy it is. We can't solve our own problems; we've never been able to. We can't deliver our own mail, we can't fix our own computers or snake our own drains; hell, many of us can't program our own VCRs. And if we all need so much help from other people, people with different training and expertise than we have, then who are we to begrudge giving other people help we can provide when they need it.

Yeah, but that's the thing, I hear someone in the audience shouting. Nobody is opposed to a fair exchange of goods and services; you fix my stopped up drain and I'll repair your computer; you get that annoying knock out of my car's exhaust system and I'll treat your kid's runny nose. That's how it's supposed to work, that's the social contract in action. And we all agree to follow the rules and obey the law and behave like good, decent, proper citizens and never disturb the peace or agitate each other, and all will be well. All Will Be Well!

It's, you know, the parasites and the slackers that decent folks object to. The lazy people who expect hard working taxpayers to support them and their worthless kids while they stay at home and watch Oprah. The worthless, greedy, ungrateful types who won't be content with decent jobs at decent pay and cheap housing in their own neighborhoods, who keep demanding higher educational opportunities, higher status work, higher pay, better housing -- nearly as good as white people, goddam them! And they want to have their own funny looking churches they call by stupid names, and they want to give their kids stupid names, and celebrate Winter Solstice holidays that aren't Christmas, and I don't know what the fuck all else; it's maddening and insane. And these people want to drive in our streets and send their kids to our schools and work in our offices and sit in our restaurants and take our jobs and bid on our contracts and have their own cable TV networks and holy Christ, we have to put up with all that shit and then, they want to whine at us about having problems? Problems that we're supposed to solve for them?

Since when is that the American Way? What the hell, did we lose a war or something?

See, here's the thing. I think people of one race solving problems for people of another race is the American Way. We needed cheap domestic labor, we hijacked half the population of the African continent and put them to work in the fields of the American South, and whipped their asses when they wouldn't work, hunted them with dogs when they ran away, and hung 'em high when they got too uppity. We needed railroads laid from coast to coast, we imported the heathen Chinee, and shot the fucker when he wanted higher wages and slightly better treatment. When those red skinned bastards who had the land first got uppity with us, we bribed other red skinned bastards to fight them for us.

For that matter, most of our independent frontiersman ancestors that we are all so proud of got here originally as indentured servants. And if our Founding Fathers hadn't all gotten together to solve each other's problems as regards the British, we wouldn't be having these arguments today.

If the United States of America has any claim to uniqueness as a political entity, it doesn’t lie in finding new, grand sounding ways to restate the phrase Somebody Else’s Problem. It stems from the fact that America truly is a nation founded by refugees, runaways, and other wretched refuse, a place where people who, in the immortal words of Bill Murray, got thrown out of every country in Europe came, mostly to be left alone… but they discovered when they got here that being left alone is the one thing that will never happen in this world if you have anything anyone else wants. So the scum and flotsam of the Earth had to come together as one entity, to solve their mutual problems.

We started by kicking the British out. Over the course of the past three centuries, we’ve more or less remembered how we began, what the foundation of our country is, and where we draw our strength from – by inviting in outsiders, and adding their particular strengths and quirks and even weaknesses to the bizarre but resilient alloy that is America. We make mistakes, we slip back into darkness and ignorance, we do terrible things sometimes. In the past we’ve built entire industries on slavery, we’ve committed genocide, we’ve broken treaties and conducted chemical warfare and covertly experimented on our own people and locked up our own citizenry simply because they looked different from us… but when we made those mistakes we learned from them, and we moved forward, and we’ve done our best to put those things behind us, sometimes at terrible, terrible cost… but we’ve always emerged from these things stronger for the experience.

Now we are backsliding again. We are trying to slam the doors closed to one group of brown people we don’t like who live nearby, while we are doing our level best to wipe out another group of brown people we really don’t like who live on the other side of the world, on land that has resources that we covet. Our national rhetoric is filled with hate and vitriol and rage, our foreign policy is defined by secret torture and illegal occupation and mass murder, our democracy has been undermined and humiliated, our liberties are diminished and endangered, and the people in power over us brazenly claim to be above even the watered down, ridiculously biased laws they themselves have allowed to be enacted.

And we are growing numb to it all, and the opiate of the American masses is a simple mantra:

It’s Somebody Else’s Problem.

It isn’t. It’s our problem. It’s your problem, and it’s my problem, and it’s your mom’s problem, and your kids’ problem. I don’t know what to do about it, but maybe it’s a start to simply acknowledge that This Is All Of Our Problem. We have to do something about it.

Probably something more than just blogging about it, but I’m goddamned if I have much of an idea what.

Hey, I'm nominated!

Over at the Koufax Awards, I'm nominated!

Of course, I nominated myself, and I can't possibly win, so, you know, sic gloria transit mundi, or something.

But, still, it's a link. Maybe a few more people will read my stuff.

Next year I nominate my pictorial commentary on the Alito confirmation, Full Court Press. THEN we'll see.

The best defense

Everywhere I go on the poli-blogs lately, people are prating on and on about these Danish cartoons and the resultant protests.

Apparently, Muslims are offended because some newspaper printed some pictorial editorial satires/parodies of Muhammed, and then some other newspapers reprinted them, to make some point about freedom of expression. And because these Muslims are offended, there are Danish flags being burned and embassies being attacked and I don’t know what the hell all else.

Which leads me to the following thought:

Being offended isn’t the same thing as being right. Nor is it the same thing as being hurt, or damaged.


This is a concept I've been mulling over more and more lately. Over the past ten or twenty years, it seems to me, I hear about people being offended all the time, by every conceivable action, group, opinion, or individual behavior, every time I get out of bed, or even sleep in. Liberals, conservatives, men, women, gays, straights, Christians, Wiccans, Moslems, Republicans, Democrats, Seventh Day Adventists, rock stars, Harry Potter fans, movie critics, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, cat owners and dog owners, members of Greenpeace, hurricane victims, cattle ranchers, sheep herders, monarchists, pet shop owners, comic book fans, dairy farmers, Arabs, Jews, fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks… everybody is offended by something, and everything offends somebody.

Jesus fucking Christ.

What a bunch of babies you people have turned into.

Look, I get offended, too. But being offended is not the same thing as being damaged or harmed. If you’re damaged or harmed through the negligence or the active malice of others, then, yes, you’ve got a legitimate grievance and you can expect some kind of redress to your injuries. But offense is not an injury. Offense is personal, and subjective, and pretty much always a group effort. Somebody does something you find offensive, and you choose to be offended by it.

You are not required to take offense simply because someone says “yo mama is a skank but Lord she gives good head”. You need not take offense from someone burning your country’s flag, or insinuating that your personal hero is a jackass. It is not mandatory that you be offended when someone advises you that you’re ugly and whoever dresses you in the morning has no fashion sense.

In short, offense is never compulsory. When you are offended by something, you decide to be offended, and you need to own that, and deal with it, and then move on past it. Offense is not an entitlement, and it does not lead to one. The fact that you are offended may be important to you, and to the people who love you, but it does not, and should not, mean jack shit to any rational structure of ethics or civil jurisprudence or criminal justice system.

If you’re driving by someone’s house and you see some sort of holiday display that you find offensive, well, fine, you find it offensive. You can talk to your friends about it. You can vent about it on your blog. You can write a letter to the editor about it. You can organize a boycott of this person’s business, I guess, if you really feel that strongly about it, and I suppose you can even write your Congressman about it, and maybe you even have a right to go up and ring that person’s doorbell and advise them of your offense at their woefully benighted sense of aesthetics, although that last strikes me as starting to stretch your ‘rights’ in the matter beyond all sense or ration.

What you cannot do is threaten them with violence, or invade their property and wreck their shit, or stage violent demonstrations, or do anything else with the intent to coerce this person into behaving in a manner you find less offensive. I say again: offense is not injury, it is not harm, and you have no reasonable expectation of being able to live your life free of offensive and/or provocative stimuli. It is simply ridiculous to think otherwise.

And yet, so many many people do these days. So many people simply head straight to “Well, that pisses me off, so I’m going to fuck someone up for it”. The witless and easily offended, who feel entitled to live in a world where everything they encounter is something they agree with and/or find comforting, fly into frenzies of hatred and maniacal viciousness whenever they are even mildly vexed by something. The clothes someone is wearing, their hairstyle, their politics. What the local public school is teaching our kids. The fact that sodomy is no longer illegal in Texas. Whether that guy sitting at the bus stop has a job or not. What the person across the cafeteria is eating right now. Something. Anything. If someone is doing something somewhere, someone else is offended by it.

Being offended by stuff is fine, or at least, understandable. Being offended by shit we don’t like is, unfortunately, part of human nature. I get offended by things, too. However, you can’t expect the cops to arrest everyone who offends you, nor should you assume that your Congressman is going to sponsor legislature that will make the thing that offends you illegal. You certainly can’t go out and do violence to the person who is committing the behavior you find offensive.

To give us credit, I think most modern human beings are now aware, however grudgingly, that personal offense at someone else’s non-harmful behavior does not entitle them to take any action or reprisal against that person. Unfortunately, those who wish to take violent offense, and who are certain that they have an absolute right to live in a world where no one and nothing ever troubles them in the slightest, often cloak their personal sense of affront behind some organized cause. Religion is a wonderful way to justify acting out against the shit that pisses you off, because it’s not just that faggots/war protesters/liberals/feminazis/dope smoking animal rights whackos offend YOU, oh no. Your Holy Scripture, whatever it may be, makes it absolutely and irrefutably clear (albeit, perhaps, in archaic, poetic, allusory and ultimately near-entirely subjective terms) that these things and people that offend you so gravely also offend God. And, while, of course, offending you may not be any sort of crime, nonetheless, offending God is reprehensible, intolerable, unacceptable, and Must Be Met Head On For The Sake Of All That Is Good, Decent, Proper, And Right.

There are non-secular causes that are wonderful for justifying, and even criminalizing, the things that offend us deeply, as well. National Security is a wonderful phrase to use to justify locking up people whose behavior and opinions offend us. The War On Terror is tailor made for lending authority to our sense of infuriation at all those goddam commie symp anarchists who keep saying nasty things about the President.

In the end, it comes down to this: if you think you have a right to take violent action against those who offend you, or to legislate against the things that offend you, then you have decided to live in a world where other people have the same right to respond similarly when you offend them… as you surely will, with such an insanely judgemental, provincial, narrowminded, pigheaded, arrogant, and irrationally biased attitude.

Me, I offend people way too much with my big mouth to want to live in a world where it is considered acceptable to respond violently to such things. I prefer to tolerate things I find offensive (as long as they cause me no actual harm), with the understanding that a similar tolerance will be extended to my offensive behavior in return.

However, I have no doubt there are many people in the world who will find that viewpoint very offensive, and who will be certain that I should be arrested, sued, or simply beaten for setting it forth.

Alternities

Nate and Supergirlfriend have recently explored what might be going on with 5 different alternate timeline versions of themselves. It's a cool idea, so let's rock with it.

Here are five probable Alternate Highlanders, although chances are, in their particular segments of spacetime, they never actually called themselves Highlander:

1. Standing on a street corner in Syracuse in a soiled institutional bathrobe and old, frayed bunny slippers singing 'O dem happy feet' tunelessly and endlessly, strumming a stringless ukelele as he regales the shuffling streams of passers-by, all of whom pull up their nearly identical top coats, reflexively making sure their WE LOVE PRESIDENT FOR LIFE RONNIE buttons are prominently displayed to the lamp post cameras. If you peer closely, beneath his greying, overgrown bangs, you can see the faint, dimpled scar from the lobotomy they did on him back in 1983, after one of his college roommates, a noted Young Reagublican, reported him to the NSA as a subversive. In this bleak alternate reality, he is one of the few living individuals who is truly happy.

2. Sitting behind an expensive Apple computer in a cluttered home office somewhere, wearily pecking out the last couple of script pages for ULTIMATE TEAM AMERICA #78, while ignoring the constantly ringing phone and the intermittent sounds of anguished editors recording messages on his answering machine that are all about deadlines and schedules and something to do with the great new artist they've found for the strip, a guy named William Hung who, swear to God, draws like a young Frank Miller crossed with a late era Bill Sinkiewicz, as inked by a drunken Howard Chaykin. This particular version of Highlander likes him some Jack Daniels; it's the only thing that gets him through his days lately. But at least his old buddy Jeff Webb is still alive in this reality; he lives in the house across the street, putting out a new issue of his massively popular indie comic NEW TOMORROW every six months or so, and reveling in a frankly hedonistic lifestyle with his groupies the rest of the time.

3. Rotting in a premature grave, after I broke through the ice and drowned at the age of 8. Every man on that transport died. I wasn't there to save them, because my older brother George wasn't there to save me. No, wait. I'm starting again.

3. Having been sent off to military school at an early age by my exasperated mum, I grow up strong, straight and disciplined and, still heavily influenced by the science fiction I was drawn to in childhood, I enter NASA's training program and become an astronaut. Eagle eyed, I spot the almost fatal flaw that would have led to the Challenger explosion, and as mission commander on the early 2003 Columbia mission, I do a perilous space walk during re-entry to jury rig a rough but workable tile-patch and get my ship down safely with all aboard alive and well. Lauded as an international hero, I bask in the admiration of millions, and perhaps foolishly, allow an old college buddy to talk me into running for President. After I win, I appoint him my Chief of Staff, and spend my entire two terms surfing porn on White House computers, doing interns and Prez groupies, and playing Magic: the Gathering with Vice President Jeff Webb, while my Chief of Staff Kurt Busiek surreptiously turns America into a corporate controlled police state.

4. Hey now, I'm a rock star. I can't sing, can't dance, and don't know how to play an instrument, but in this odd slice of alternity, a few monumentally lucky breaks have negated all of that and landed me repeatedly on the cover of the Rolling Stone. My band, Glowing Plastic Jesus, has won more Grammies and sold more albums than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Huey Lewis and the News, and Elton John combined, mostly on the strength of my poignant, iconoclastic, and very nearly incoherent lyrics. Mariah Carey is one of my back up singers and my love bitch. I do a lot of coke, and am filled with existential despair, because, as you'd expect, Mariah just won't swallow no matter how much I beg. I hate this life.

5. I'm a very successful televangelist, having learned early to use my gift for gab and potential electronic charisma to exploit the gullibility of the ignorant Christian faithful. My carefully cultivated public persona as a 'reasonable fundamentalist' leads to frequent appearances on The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, and Face The Nation, and I am in line for a high cabinet post, or perhaps the Vice Presidency, in the first Jeb Administration. I spend a lot of time behind bullet proof glass, surrounded by bodyguards, wondering if any of them have been bought off by Dick Cheney yet, who wants me dead so badly he can constantly taste it in the back of his mouth, like copper, or semen.

What can I say? The real, pathetic truth is, on every alternate reality, even if there are an infinity of them, I'm miserable and lonely, trapped in a tiny cinder block duplex with a lousy job in the hell that is Zephyrhills, FL, friendless and twitching on the edge of just giving up, hocking all my HeroClix, and using the proceeds to buy a cheap handgun so I can go on a homicidal rampage at work the next day, doing my best to take out the half dozen people I hate the most just before hopefully committing suicide by cop. The cops in Zephyrhills are so incompetent that I may well live through it, though, which is the only thought that keeps that last fraying cord of sanity from snapping... yet.

The fact is, only on this timeline, where SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids have saved me from a hell on Earth worse than death, am I even remotely happy. This is, truly, the best of all possible worlds.

Our house is a very very very fine house

With Tippy in the yard... life used to be so hard...

Okay, two posts back I mentioned our wonderful snowman, Tippy. SuperGirlfriend borrowed a digital camera and took a pic of him, and as it turns out, it's a lovely pic of our very lovely house, as well. So, enjoy.


Here's a close up of Tippy the Snowman himself. Yes, we have the only inebriated snowman in all of River City. One good thaw, though, and we'll have to rename him Melty. Dig him while you can.

Okay, put the snow shovels down. It's just an expression.

Oh, in a note that only Mike Norton will enjoy, Tippy's shoe button eyes? The bottoms of HeroClix dials. The rookie Aurora and Sunfire, I believe, without the figs.

This post is short enough that I didn't truncate it, so ignore the hyperbolic link below.

Score!

I mentioned, back in my Christmas post, just how well the case of Indy clix I bought for Super Drama Teen worked out... I'd hoped she might pick up one Unique Hellboy, since I was pretty sure she'd have been willing to trade it to Super Dependable Teen, who is a HUGE Hellboy fan. Instead, she snared two of them... a pretty good catch, since the Unique Hellboy is about the most expensive piece in the entire Indy set. Prices vary from one shop to another, but generally, if you order one from a place like IconsUSA or Gathering Ground, you can expect to pay something between $15 and $20 for one.


These prices are slightly inflated over the reality that is Ebay. After the game we played Saturday, Super Drama Teen broached the subject of just how much the Unique Hellboy was worth. I went out on Ebay to take a look, and advised her from what I could see, while it sold for the prices I've quoted above at various shops, on Ebay it looked like she could rely on getting at least $10 for it. I advised her, however, that if she could put together a complete Hellboy REV, to sell as a package along with the Unique, she might well get $20 to $30.

After going back and forth on that for a while, talking about the relative pros and cons of going the Ebay route, she finally just decided to sell me the fig for $10 cash in hand. So everybody's happy... she gets some money without hassing around with auctions and Ebay fees and packages and mailing stuff and the uncertainty of an open bidding process, and I get a Unique Hellboy. Yay!

The graphic doesn't really do the fig justice, by the way; it's actually MUCH nicer looking when you're looking at the real thing.

Snowy Saturday

Every once in a while, you get a keeper.

HeroClix, snowball fights and snowman building, hot chocolate, grocery shopping, and laundry... all with my favorite people in the world, SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids.

Linear time is almost certainly an odd perceptual illusion created by the way our rather slow protein brains process sensory input. At least a few quantum physicists believe that there is no duration, no past, no future -- there is only an eternal now, in which everything that has ever happened, and that ever will happen, is actually happening, continuously, all around us, all the time.

It's possible that's true, and that individual consciousness, along with yesterday, today, and tomorrow, are simply chimeras created by the peculiar manner in which we perceive and process the information all around us. Perhaps we are all each other, all the time, and the rest of the universe, too, and our invidividual selves are merely fractal points amidst the vast infinitely faceted crystal that is reality.

Maybe we really know everything, all the time... we just choose not to remember it, to make our lives bearable. Maybe the illusion of other entities we create by subdividing our own consciousness and by limiting our own perceptual array is all that makes eternal existence as the only consciousness in a self aware reality bearable.

And maybe, if all that's true, we know we have to surround ourselves with dull days, frustrations, displeasures, and annoyances -- because without such things, the very rare good days that we, as God, dole out to ourselves would be meaningless.

Whatever the case, yesterday was a keeper.

An early afternoon HeroClix battle with the older two SuperKids was a joy. I didn't win, but after Super Dependable Teen's small JLA squad (experienced Icons Superman, veteran Hypertime Flash, veteran Icons Wonder Woman, and veteran Hypertime Plastic Man) and my original Avengers line up (rookie IC Hulk, vet CT Thor, Unique IC Wasp, AW Anthony Stark base with the Unique Golden Iron Man fig on it, and my Atom subbing in as Ant-Man) managed to polish off Super Drama Teen's gang of Indy goobers (Unique Hellboy, Unique Judge Death, Vet Shi, vet Johnny Alpha, Unique Hecate), we went back to slapping each other around, as was only fitting when the JLA meets the Avengers anywhere in the multiverse. We'd each taken some losses along the way (Iron Man took two early shots from Superman's heat vision that had sent him reeling into retreat; he was finally taken out when Hecate mind controlled Ant-Man and Ant-Man whacked his old avenging buddy from behind, most likely, I'm thinking, by sending some army ants in through Iron Man's helmet slits to take him out. Then Wonder Woman, tired of the Wasp buzzing around distributing Incapacitation tokens along with a few clicks of damage via her Stunning Blow feat, came charging across the new AW map Mike Norton had just gifted me with and swatted the dizzy young heiress out of the air -- 5 clicks of damage, plus one for Charge, say hello to the Excedrin bottle Janet van Dyne.)

I would probably have won the game, having carefully used the Thunderbolts feat to give my original Avengers the JSA team ability, after which I was just as meticulous in making sure that the entire team was always in adjacency to each other, so they could all share Ant-Man's 20 defense. (Ant-Man would have been using his ant armies to swarm the Avengers' opponents, keeping them off balance and allowing his allies to have a very high relative defense, of course.) What undid me was the Disbanded Battlefield Condition coming out of our random BC deck and sticking around for half the game. Even so, the bout eventually came down to a somewhat chewed up Ant-Man going up against a rather beat down Flash. As you'd expect, Hank Pym, for all his smarts, wasn't a match for super-speed.

But still, it was a lovely and enjoyable game. Superman unwisely gave the Hulk one good solid five click shot early in the game, putting ol' Green-genes onto his best click (12 AV, four damage with Battle Fury, 17 defense with Invulnerability) and I nurtured that click carefully and used the fig to distribute some serious pain before he finally went down. (To this end -- getting a figure to, and keeping it on, one particular click on its dial, I cannot recommend a shared 20 Defense Value enough.) Iron Man was on his last click for much of the game and the 20 defense he had for many rounds also kept him in it; I used his end dial Outwit to good effect, too, until he finally got knocked out.

After that, we went outside to enjoy the snow. Snowballs flew like insults in the blogosphere, and everyone got thoroughly pelted. Then we built a snowman, who is currently leaning drunkenly so far to the left or right (depending on where you are standing to look at him) that it amazes me he hasn't toppled over yet. Then it was back to the snowball battles. I discovered by direct experimentation that shouting "I am your king! I COMMAND you to cease your attacks and surrender!" in a goofy Monty Python accent works wonderfully as a snowball attractant.

Then we repaired back into the SuperFamily Secret Headquarters for some of SuperGirlfriend's wonderful hot chocolate. Ahhhhhh... snowball fights and snowman building with SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids, followed by hot chocolate in the kitchen out of the snowman mugs I bought us all for Christmas... life don' ged much betta dan dis.

There was some domestic stuff in there too... grocery shopping with SuperGirlfriend and SuperAdorable Kid in the morning, while the older two SuperKids slept in, and then laundry with SuperGirlfriend late last evening, where a complete jackass with no social skills at all did his best to ruin our evening by sulking for hours about us taking up nine washers (hey, we have three kids, deal with it, berk). But my domestic bliss cannot be dispelled merely by some overgrown baby having a hissy fit because he had to use front loaders to do his own laundry.

A few more chores on the list for today, and then, tomorrow, I start on ten hour days at work... which won't be fun while I'm working them, but the extra day off to spend with SG and the kids will be vastly appreciated all the way around.

Oh, a tip of the ancient katana (as well as my heartfelt thanks) go out to Mike Norton, for the package of clix and the map he sent along to me last week, as well as recent plugs on his blog in regard to this one. I also want to thank everyone who has responded to my recent invitation. Hopefully, that will step up the interaction level on the blog now that comment moderation won't be a factor for many of you.

SuperGirlfriend and SuperAdorable Kid are in the kitchen making monkey bread, and Super Drama Teen is in the back bedroom playing KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC on my X-box. Time to go see what kind of trouble I can get in. (Okay, actually, I'm just going to make the bed and grab a shower, but everyone likes to sound like a bad ass when they can...)

Sweet sweet liquor eases the pain

The entry below was originally written back on September 6, 2002. Some of the references will be dated. Still, I think it's one of the best things I've ever written, and I'm happy to reproduce it now.

William Burton, the sanest blogger I've yet encountered, has this to say for himself:

Doc Nebula made the point in an email that alcohol is unique in its ability to turn the mind off and let us stop thinking for a while and that this makes it uniquely attractive to people who want to drown their sorrows. He goes on to add:

Personally, I don't think there's anything out there, no matter what we legalize, that will replace booze, because I don't think there's anything out there that represses the higher reasoning center as well as booze does. Booze also lowers inhibitions, which people really like a lot. Of course, inhibitions are the very warp and woof of civilized behavior, but people get really sick of being civilized. Which is probably why as soon as a particular culture starts accruing a lot of laws and customs and taboos, they also learn to distill hard liquor.

He could very well be right. Maybe alcohol does have some unique property that makes it more attractive as an intoxicant than anything else around. If this is true, then we can't assume that legalization would cause drug addictions in the same numbers as we have alcoholics (and it would be pretty safe to assume that it wouldn't).

Now, you can already figure that I deeply admire anyone who quotes me in public and then says agreeable things afterward. However, I deeply admired William Burton and his brilliant fucking blog from the moment I first encountered it, and you should too. And since attention from a great blog requires at least more than the usual bare minimum slack-off effort I put into these things, I actually did some research. To wit:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/alcohol4.htm actually tells us the following:

Cerebral Cortex

The cerebral cortex is the highest portion of the brain. The cortex processes information from your senses, does your "thought" processing and consciousness (in combination with a structure called the basal ganglia), initiates most voluntary muscle movements and influences lower-order brain centers. In the cortex, alcohol does the following:

Depresses the behavioral inhibitory centers - The person becomes more talkative, more self-confident and less socially inhibited.

Slows down the processing of information from the senses - The person has trouble seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting; also, the threshold for pain is raised.

Inhibits thought processes - The person does not use good judgement or think clearly.

Alcohol also affects the cerebellum, the limbic system, the hypothalamus, and the pituitary gland, but all that basically goes to physical coordination and sexual function. What I’m interested in here is what alcohol does to a person’s mental peformance, as opposed to what the various other common and popular recreational drugs do. Does what I offhandedly threw at William, and he so cordially reproduced, hold water? Let’s find out:

http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-marijuana.html tells us:

THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana, binds to and activates specific receptors, known as cannabinoid receptors.

By activating these receptors, THC interferes with the normal functioning of the cerebellum, the part of the brain most responsible for balance, posture, and coordination of movement.

The hippocampus, which is involved with memory formation, also contains many cannabinoid receptors.

Marijuana also affects receptors in brain areas and structures responsible for sensory perception. Marijuana interferes with the receiving of sensory messages (for example, touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell) in the cerebral cortex. … Marijuana activates cannabinoid receptors in these various areas of the cerebrum and results in the brain misinterpreting the nerve impulses from the different sense organs.


Interesting. http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-opiates.html tells us:

Two important effects produced by opiates, such as morphine, are pleasure (or reward) and pain relief. The brain itself also produces substances known as endorphins that activate the opiate receptors. Research indicates that endorphins are involved in many things, including respiration, nausea, vomiting, pain modulation, and hormonal regulation.

Within the reward system, the morphine activates opiate receptors in the VTA, nucleus accumbens, and cerebral cortex (refer to the Introduction for information on the reward system). Research suggests that stimulation of opiate receptors by morphine results in feelings of reward and activates the pleasure circuit by causing greater amounts of dopamine to be released within the nucleus accumbens. This causes an intense euphoria, or rush, that lasts only briefly and is followed by a few hours of a relaxed, contented state. This excessive release of dopamine and stimulation of the reward system can lead to addiction.

Opiates also act directly on the respiratory center in the brainstem, where they cause a slowdown in activity. This results in a decrease in breathing rate. Excessive amounts of an opiate, like heroin, can cause the respiratory centers to shut down breathing altogether. When someone overdoses on heroin, it is the action of heroin in the brainstem respiratory centers that can cause the person to stop breathing and die.

Following up on this, we come to http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-hallucinogens.html , which tells us:

Because serotonin has a role in many of the brain's functions, activation of its receptors by LSD produces widespread effects, including rapid emotional swings, and altered perceptions, and if taken in a large enough dose, delusions and visual hallucinations.

PCP, which is not a true hallucinogen, can affect many neurotransmitter systems. It interferes with the functioning of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is found in neurons throughout the brain. Like many other drugs, it also causes dopamine to be released from neurons into the synapse.

And then, there’s http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-stimulants.html from which we learn:

Cocaine has also been found to specifically affect the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which are involved in aspects of memory and learning. The amygdala has been linked to emotional aspects of memory [about methamphetemines] It produces its effects by causing dopamine and norepinephrine to be released into the synapse in several areas of the brain, including the nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and the striatum, a brain area involved in movement.

And last but not least, let’s not leave out the only drug in the world that may be nearly as prevalently abused (at least, in the last five or six centuries), as alcohol, by turning to http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-nicotine.html for the following fun facts:

Regular nicotine use causes changes in both the number of cholinergic receptors and the sensitivity of these receptors to nicotine and acetylcholine. … Recently, research has shown that nicotine also stimulates the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain's pleasure circuit... This release of dopamine is similar to that seen for other drugs of abuse, such as heroin and cocaine, and is thought to underlie the pleasurable sensations experienced by many smokers.

Okay. Now what does all that mean? (And bear in mind, I’m a temporary clerical worker, a wannabe writer, and a former English major who dropped out, so my analysis/summation may be flawed):

Well, it seems to mean that all that stuff I tossed off to William based on just vague general bullshit impressions I had floating around in my brain, was actually correct. To wit:

Every drug that is readily abused affects the brain in some way, and since the cerebral cortex is extremely important to our day to day functioning as sentient human beings, and the brain is very complex, many of them seem to impact the functioning of the cerebral cortex in some way. However, from what I can see, above, only alcohol goes immediately to work on the cerebral cortext, and only alcohol shuts it down in a nearly comprehensive fashion. Marijuana specifically affects sensory interpreters in the cerebral cortext, causing perceptual data to become confused ("oh, man, I can hear your shirt, turn it down"), and the opiates cause endorphins and dopamine (pleasure chemicals) to be generated throughout the brain, including in the cerebral cortext. Yet alcohol is the only drug listed here that goes right to work with a big ol' hammer on our center of higher reasoning and judgement.

Now let’s think about that for a second. I’m well aware that I have a tendency to make sweeping statements often only backed up by my own vague notions gathered from a lifetime spent reading trash and watching movies/TV. I have no degrees, have written no learned papers (nor have I read very frickin’ many). Nonetheless, it seems to me to be inarguable that alcohol, not only through its nearly universal presence among every currently extant human culture, but through very nearly every historically recorded human culture as well, has to be the most universally manufactured and (ab)used intoxicant chemical known to man.

I mean, yes, nicotine, hell, right up through 1980, nicotine was being inhaled by very nearly every American man, woman, and child in the history of the nation, and its use world wide is extraordinary and extensive. But since the health impacts of nicotine have been discovered, nicotine use has declined drastically (at least, in U.S. markets). Not so for alcohol. Alcohol is now just as much a cultural fixture as it has ever been. More studies have been done and public awareness as to alcohol addiction, and so called alcohol abuse, have been raised to unprecedented heights, but still, the overwhelming majority of adults, and in industrialized areas outside the U.S., children, imbibe some alcohol, usually daily. And I put a ‘so called’ in front of the phrase 'alcohol abuse' not because I don’t believe in the idea that alcohol can be abused, but because I’m not at all convinced that in point of fact, there is a proper use for alcohol (other than as a cleaner, I mean). It’s a toxin, after all. I'm not at all sure we're supposed to be ingesting it for any healthy, rational purpose.

But let’s look at the other stuff. Heroin is popular, certainly, but I think I’m safe in saying that less than a majority of the world’s population takes heroin, and less than a majority would, even if it were legal and freely available on every streetcorner. The same is true for pretty much every other recreational drug on the list. Make all that stuff legal and as freely available as chocolate and still, I think less than half the population would ever take any of it.

On the other hand, even in places where alcohol is illegal, a VAST majority of the population ingests it, generally on a daily basis.

Colin Wilson, in his amazing tome A Criminal History of Mankind provides horrific descriptions, taken from actual contemporary accounts, of what happened when the first distilled liquor, gin, was introduced to Europe and eventually made its way to England, back in the 17th Century.

By 1688, the English working classes were alcohol starved. The consumption of gin rose steadily, from half a million gallons around 1690 to three and a half million by 1727 and -- by the middle of the century -- to nineteen million gallons.

The result was a crime wave... crimes to obtain money for gin became as common as crimes to obtain money for drugs in our own society. Quite suddenly, England was virtually in a state of war with criminals...

Henry Fielding reckoned that a hundred thousand people in London alone lived mainly on gin. Another observer stood outside a gin palace for three hours one evening and counted 1,411 people going in and out. These 'palaces' usually consisted of a shed, full of barrels of gin; the customers merely came to buy a pennysworth of gin, which explains the enormous number. Whole families, including father, mother, and children then sat on the pavement and drank themselves unconscious; with gin at a penny a quart, it was not difficult.

Fielding remarked that 'gin disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame and emboldens them to commit every wicked and dangerous enterprise'...
In short, gin very nearly destroyed the entire economy and almost completely wrecked the culture of Europe and England. Every member of the lower, working classes – men, women, children – exposed to the effects of gin did nothing but drink until they passed out. Upon regaining consciousness, they’d stagger out, do whatever they had to in order to secure enough money to buy more gin, then go back to one of the gin-stalls that flourished in nearly every doorway where a distillery or a distribution stand could be set up, buy more gin, and again, drink themselves into a stupor.

The accounts from the times are hellish. Adults sold themselves, or stole, or murdered, to get money. Parents sold their children, or rented them out as prostitutes; children themselves, once exposed to the distilled liquor, willingly sold themselves to raise gin money. It was, in fact, the gin induced crime frenzy that led to the establishment of the world's first organized police force, the Bow Street Runners (predecessors to England's 'bobbies'), organized in 1753 by the above quoted novelist and former magistrate Henry Fielding.

Opium, on the other hand, was once much more commonly abused than it is now, but it never attained the universality of gin, when gin was first introduced to the European populations. There were once opium dens in every slum in Europe and America, but only a minority of the poor and the disadvantaged tried opium, or became addicted to it. Each distillation/concentration of opium, and each new discovery as to yet another form of recreational mind altering substance, has certainly seen some popularity and success among the minority of the human population that craves to have its reality substantially altered, if only temporarily… but only alcohol has swept the world, and become the daily drug of choice for the vast majority.

I’m convinced that alcohol is, for some reason, THE drug of choice for humanity, and has been ever since mankind first started forming social units larger than an immediate family.

Many drugs, at least, in their raw, natural state, are far easier to manufacture than alcohol (some natural hallucinogens can simply be ingested as found in nature and provide quite a satisfactory ‘high’). And mankind has always sought, for whatever reason, to flee everyday consciousness. Yet despite the fact that various natural substances can provide more powerful effects than alcohol, for far less effort, mankind has always fermented pretty much anything that would ferment, into alcohol.

Looking, for the moment, at mind altering chemicals in general, they seem to me to break down into three broad categories:

The ones that make you happy, like opiates, which intensely stimulate the pleasure centers and chemicals manufactured by the brain, like dopamine and endorphins;

The ones that make you crazy, like marijuana (mildly), LSD, and PCP, by deranging your sensory perceptions and creating hallucinations;

And the one that makes you stupid: alcohol.

The rest of them affect various different areas of the brain chemistry, as well as the body, and in very specific ways, some of them impact the cerebral cortext. But alcohol is the only one that simply shuts down the cerebral cortext… the higher the dosage of alcohol, the quicker and more comprehensively you stop thinking, you lose your capacity for making rational judgements, for analysis, for logic.

The inevitable conclusion seems to be that less than a majority of humans desire artificial happiness enough to use drugs to get there (although I should caution that a whole lot of modern people ingest chocolate and caffein on a daily basis, so apparently we all, at least to some minor extent, have a desire to self medicate), and similarly, less than a majority are so bored with the world they perceive on a daily basis that they seek to derange their senses through chemicals. But a vast, vast majority wants to dull their perceptions of the world, and numb their higher reasoning faculties, and lower their own inhibitions. In short, the vast majority of sentient beings on this planet, for whatever reason, are not comfortable with their sentience. They don’t like to think. They need, or at least, greatly desire, to turn off their human brains on a daily basis, for at least a limited period of time.

Most other drugs either change the way the brain functions, or, in fact, amplify certain of its functions unnecessarily. Alcohol seems to be the only drug that shuts the higher reasoning centers of the brain down… and alcohol is the drug that nearly every human being who has ever walked the earth has used, pretty much as often as they can get away with it, for as far back as our history runs.

Even in Islamic countries, where violations of most other holy laws can lead to swift and barbarically cruel punishments, surreptitious alcohol consumption is mostly winked at. (This last observation may be false; it’s based entirely on perceptions I’ve gotten from various media sources, mostly fictional. If it’s not true – if getting caught drinking a beer in Saudi Arabia will get an Islamic man dragged out in the street and stoned to death, and if, in fact, the majority of the population of Islam-ruled countries live their day to day lives entirely or largely without any alcohol at all – then I apologize, and in fact, will readily admit that my thesis must somehow be wrong. Or, worse, since I consider Arabic/Islamic culture to be mostly pretty nuts, I might even have to admit that alcohol is a good thing and has some beneficial social effect. But until someone presents me with actual facts and figures from a reputable source, I’m going to assume that there is as thriving a black market for booze in Islamic nations as there was in America under Prohibition.)

The upshot seems to be: most people simply don’t like to think, and if it were possible for them to do so and still function within society, they’d just stop doing it.

Which, come to think of it, may explain how demagogues like Rush Limbaugh manage to become so popular.

Spoiler City

If you haven't read Infinite Crisis #4 or any of the more recent issues of Green Lantern -- eyes slideways, spud. I'll be chattin' them up, assuming I have sufficient time before I have to bolt for the bus stop.



I'm losing some faith in Geoff Johns. But maybe it's just that he's pouring it all into INFINITE CRISIS and doesn't have much left in the tank for GREEN LANTERN. That could be. All I know is, the last two issues of GREEN LANTERN have struck me as very lackluster, while INFINITE CRISIS continues to rock hard.

On GREEN LANTERN -- it may just be that GL is a concept where the traditional Golden/Silver Age secret identity makes little sense. I postulated in this Martian Vision entry that Green Lanterns might well wear masks as a symbol, to show the universe they protected that when they were in uniform, they were not individuals any more, but they represented something higher and greater... in other words, when you see the mask and the power ring, it's never personal, it's always business. And that makes sense to me. But why should a Green Lantern need a secret identity? They aren't vigilantes; they are law officers, appointed to their post by the oldest legitimate authority in the cosmos.

I've always thought Hal could have just been straight up with the world, including all his weird friends (the Innuit guy with the pastry-derived name, and that bitch on wheels he had the rotten judgement to be in love with, among others) about his other job. Yeah, he's got enemies, and yeah, sure, some of them might be dumb enough to go after one of his loved ones... once... but I doubt they'd have done it again, once they saw Power Ring Retribution in action. And overall, Green Lantern isn't just a superhero name or a secret ID... it's title, and it's a job. Hal could have been open about it. And who knows, that openness might have set him apart enough from the cookie cutter mold of DC's Silver Age pantheon so his book wouldn't have been in constant danger of cancellation.

I babble all this because it strikes me that what's wrong with Johns' current work on GL is all coming through the secret identity. About the only element I'm uncomfortable with in the current title is Hal's day job -- he's rejoined the Air Force, apparently for no other reason than to get to fly jets. And he doesn't even get to do that much; he shows up for a posted flight time but bam!, his new boss, an Air Force general who knows his secret identity, calls him up and sends GL on a mission instead.

The only real reason Hal seems to even have a secret ID is that (a) it gives the writer another plot device to work around and (b) it gives Hal a shot at the character who is obviously intended to be his new romantic interest, a female top gun military pilot only known, to date, as Cowgirl. Yay. They take Carol Ferris off the table, which makes me cheer, and who do they put out there instead? Cowgirl. Yippee kai yay, motherfucker.

Most of the rest of the recent issues seems inventive enough. Johns is doing cool stuff with Hector Hammond and the Shark, tying these two apparently accidentally evolved GL villains together with some weird aliens who like doing this sort of thing to primitive beings. Yeah... I think it's just the secret ID stuff that's bugging me.

Now, as to INFINITE CRISIS #4:

Heh. What gets mopey useless dickhead Conner mad enough to fight? Earth-Prime Superboy kicked his dog! Yeah, that would piss me off, too.

Whoa! Every punk ass teen or former teen superhero in the world shows up to save Conner from getting the asswhipping he so richly deserves at the soon to be gore streaked hand of the clearly psychotic Earth-Prime Superboy. And then one of them (I have no idea what her name is, but Lord, I wish it had been Starfire) leaps into the fray, snarling insults, and -- CHRIST!!! HER BLOCK IS KNOCKED OFF! (Unlike Rock Em Sock Em Robots, though, I don't believe you can press it right back on again.) Man, we never saw this stuff in the Silver Age. Oh, God, why couldn't it have been Starfire?

Elsewhere in the book, Chemo wipes out Bludhaven Falls! I don't care. But jesus, if Modern Age means cold blooded murder (and I'm guessing it does) Johns is putting the pedal to the metal here.

"When a Luthor stands next to a Superman -- they will ALWAYS be at odds." Oh my yes.

You know, I've been waiting for a pre-Crisis Superboy to come back, tell Conner he's not Superboy, and kick his ass for him for what, fifteen, twenty years now? I suspect Johns knows a lot of us have been waiting for that... so this is what he gives us. Modern Age fans have nothing to bitch about; the whole purpose of this little riff is to force everyone in the audience to accept that Conner really IS Superboy. Nobody but Johns could have made me buy that... but he's doing it.

Booster is still trying to track down the new Blue Beetle. Those of us who read Kung Fu Monkey are already way ahead of the curve here, though.

A new Spectre. Nobody I've ever heard of. But he's, you know, ethnic, just like the new Blue Beetle. So that's... well... I guess it's cool. Actually, I don't care. I'm just glad it's not Hal any more.

Hmmm. You know, EP-Superboy actually killed quite a few people, towards the end of that brawl. And I don't know who ANY of them are.

They couldn't have killed ONE lousy New Teen Titan I recognized? Starfire? Cyborg? Raven? SOMEbody?

And... finally... WHAT an ending. Johns has managed to end EVERY issue of this miniseries so far in a way that makes you crazy to get the next issue. It's masterful.

Geez, I wish I could just pick this up as a TPB...

Yet another blast from the past

More stuff from old blog pages. But cool stuff, nonetheless. Holla!

A DRAMATIZATION FOR OUR VIEWING AUDIENCE AT HOME

George Bush, Jr., boy genius, stood proudly next to his latest amazing invention. He could barely contain himself, he was so excited!

“So, what’s all this then, Junior?” George Sr., one time All-American international espionage hero asked, beaming proudly at his brilliant son.

George Bush, Jr., whisked aside the drape covering his latest discovery with a showmanlike flourish! “Look, Dad!” the boy crowed proudly. “It’s my newest Model America!”

George Sr. bent over the table, staring in frank admiration at the intricate clockwork mechanism as it quietly purred away, gears and cogs and belts all churning smoothly together, a quietly prosperous hum suffusing his genius son’s lab-chamber. “Well, golly, son,” George Sr. exclaimed, “it’s a humdinger! What does it do?”

“It does everything, Pop!” George Jr. declared. “Look! Look at the domestic economic indices! Virtually no inflation! Stable prices! Jobs for every hard working man at high enough wages to allow every decent wife and mom to stay home and raise a family in the comfort and safety that God fearing working class Americans deserve! And low taxes too, because with those good, well paid jobs for everyone, there’s no need for wasteful social services like Welfare or Unemployment! And we won’t need any sort of health care plan, either…”

George Sr.’s eyes narrowed. “Damned socialized medicine!” he growled, his voice an authoritative bark.

“Yes sir, darned socialized medicine, we won’t need it!” George Jr. exulted. “Look at the GNP!” He waved to a bank of pistons pumping away smoothly and powerfully. “Everyone will have more than enough wages coming in to afford their own health care coverage!”

George Sr. tapped his pipe against his teeth thoughtfully. “But son,” he said, “you haven’t re-enabled that old Labor Union impulse engine, have you? Because while it does drive wages up, believe me, an organized work force is more trouble than it’s worth! And it cuts into corporate profits and management incentive bonuses – and without those, you don’t have an American Dream!”


“I knew you’d think that, Pop,” George Jr. allowed, “but no sir, if you check the circular file –“ Here the boy inventor kicked a metal wastecan beneath his workbench – “you’ll find that Labor Union impulse engine right where obsolete socialist ideas like that belong! No, there’s so much capital flowing through my Model America, we have high wage jobs for labor with no need for unionization, and plenty of money left over for management incentives! Plenty of profit! Why, there’s even more than enough to shift the entire tax burden to the shoulders of the working class where it belongs –“

“The heroic working class!” George Sr. said, eyes gleaming.

“Absolutely, Dad!” George Jr. agreed fervently. “And see?” He gestured to one entire section of obviously well lubricated, free spinning gearing. “That lets us put back in all the special loopholes in the tax code, to provide incentives for the wealthy tycoons and speculators that are so essential to the financial inspiration that keeps the stock market afloat!”

“Holy shit, son!” George Sr declared. “I mean, Great Scott! This is astonishing! But what in the world –“


“But that’s not all, Dad!” George Jr. said, waving his arms excitedly. “By golly, that’s not the half of it! Take a look at the foreign policy mechanisms!”

George Sr. narrowed his crafty eyes and fixed his gaze – the gaze of a seasoned Cold Warrior – on the section of gears and driving shafts his brilliant son was pointing out now. Then he blinked, his mouth falling open in astonishment!

“Great Leaping Laertes, son! That’s… that’s impossible!” The father’s eyes opened wide as he took it in. “Those compliance levels on the part of every other industrialized nation on the face of the Earth – how could that ever happen? Of course we know that America is always right, but you’d never get all those foreigners to agree!” George Sr. scowled suspiciously. “You’re not planning on using a military engine for this, are you? America has the finest military drivers in history but in a modern environment it’s not enough –“

“We only need the military at the start, dad,” George Jr. opined modestly, “just to give the whole thing its initial push start! And it’s a very minor investment – nothing a few companies of Special Forces can’t handle! In and out, easy as pie!”

“Well, by jingo, son, I have to say, it’s a good looking device!” George Sr said, whistling in admiration. “But I can’t imagine what your power source is. Some sort of strange X material? What could possibly run something as huge as this so smoothly? And for how long?”

“That’s just it, Dad,” George Jr said, growing serious. “We do need a big supply of the special power source this model requires. But as it turns out, one of your old enemies happens to be sitting on a huge stockpile of it! Enough to last forever! Or at least through my second and third and fourth terms, and then Li’l Jeb’s four terms, and by then the twins will be old enough --!”

George Jr took a deep breath and wiped his brow, visibly taking a grip on himself. “But never mind that right now, Dad, there’s enough there to last forever! And it’s my intention to take it away from that evil prick who is currently sitting on it, and put it to the service of freedom and democracy!”

George Sr. grew serious as well, his hawklike gaze hooded, his features brooding. “Good heavens, son, you can’t mean –“

George Jr. nodded grimly. “I sure do, Dad! It’s time America paid a call on the Butcher of Baghdad! The resources we need to maintain truth, justice and the American way – and to spread those values across the globe – are all right there! He’s standing in the way of freedom! He’s jeopardizing our entire way of life! And he can’t be allowed to continue!”

-- from George Bush Jr. and his Petroleum Powered Panacea, Boy’s Adventure Books, 2002

A blast from the past

No time to blog, but here's something I found while idly wandering through a past blog page. It was on one of my 'secret blog pages', so only about three people have read it prior to this, I believe.

October 30 2002

Nobody likes poor people.

The largest part of my current job -- a temp assignment that has been going on for two years now -- is typing City Council minutes. That means I sit at a computer and listen to the tapes of City Council meetings, and then boil all that stuff down to a few paragraphs of standard boilerplate like 'There was a brief discussion amongst Council regarding the best way to quietly exterminate Tampa's homeless population and sell their bodies to medical science, after which the following action was taken:

Motion: (Kervorkian-Himmler) That the Legal Department be directed to prepare a Special Ordinance implementing a Special Policy towards Tampa's homeless population. Motion carried.'

Yeah, I'm being very heavily ironic. Our City Council prefers to simply ignore the homeless (even when they're insisting on coming to Council and directly addressing Council asking for help), and they'd never go on the record with a motion like that.

Yet other stuff does go on the record. For example:

Last week our Mayor got up in front of Council and extolled the virtues, once more, of his major redevelopment plan for downtown. One of the big things Mayor Greco, along with our City Council, has been trying to do for most of a decade is get people to live downtown. They regard a stable residential base in the downtown area as the key driver to an economic resurgence there... if there are people living there, then businesses will move into downtown to service that population, which makes the rents go up, which raises the tax base, and, you know, All Will Be Well.

But, as I said at the top, nobody likes poor people, and one can never see that more clearly than when Dick Greco and Tampa's City Council are talking... nay, True Believer, practically salivating... into microphones on the record about their plans for redeveloping downtown with new residential projects.

One of Dick Greco's favorite phrases when he talks about this stuff is 'market price'. Another is 'market driven'. In modern day American politicalese this basically translates as 'this will not be low income housing, folks'.

'Market price', in Tampa's burgeoning yuppie real estate market, means a several thousand s.f. housing unit priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It does not mean apartments, regardless of how gated or exclusive or lease restricted those apartments might be, because ultimately, renters do not pay the same sort of property taxes as homeowners, and anyway, no matter how hard you try, you can never be sure you're going to keep the shiftless element entirely out of transitory housing. No, this means condos, whose prices will start around $110,000, and scale upward from there to the half million dollar range.

In other words, Tampa doesn't want any poor people living downtown.

In point of fact, Tampa doesn't want any poor people living within its city limits, period. Given its druthers, Tampa (or its ruling elite, elected and non-elected, anyway) would really prefer that everyone living in Tampa own real estate, rather than rent it, drive Jaguars and BMWs rather than riding the bus, and eat all their meals in expensive restaurants, rather than fast food places or, god forbid, actually staying home to cook.

Tampa understands that it needs the poor to wash the dishes and bus the tables in its fancy restaurants, to wax and detail its Jaguars and BMWs, and to man the counters at its countless filling stations, and will grudgingly admit that there are a great many other jobs out there in the service area that Tampa's preferred residential base would never want to do that the poor are just made for, but if Tampa had its way, all the poor would live over in Brandon or Riverside and they'd all carpool to work in rented Volkswagon vans... or they'd ride on a bus system fully subsidized by the fare box (so the affluent class wouldn't have to be vexed by having their taxes diverted into something they themselves wouldn't be caught dead using), and if that meant that the average minimum wage worker in Tampa was paying $11 a day to get to and from work, well, shit, that's just a little less money they can spend on illegal drugs, right?

Admittedly, there's another layer to all this that those who don't live here in the New South will need to have explicated. Down here, you can't simply talk about income brackets... or rather, you can, and you do, but that's not all you're talking about. When Tampa's Mayor and Tampa's City Council smile and nod like bobble-head dolls at a proposal to create 'market price' residential space in downtown, they're not simply subtly saying 'we don't want no PO' FOLKS down here', what they're actually saying is, 'we don't want no BLACK FOLKS down here'.

It's a bit more complex than that, I grant you. These days, 'BLACK FOLKS' also includes most brown folks, regardless of actual ethnicity. And, of course, it's not ENTIRELY racist, because white folks who can't afford to mortgage a $125,000 condo are also clearly excluded (that would be me) while black & brown folks who have, somehow, managed to put together enough scratch to make those kind of monthly payments are certainly welcome.

(That last may not actually be true; oddly, black and brown folks, even when they have good jobs and good credit ratings, seem to have difficulty finding mortgage providers down here in the New South. And they also often have trouble with the Local Civic Association Application Process. Whereas I, if I could only come across a suitcase stuffed with illicit drug money, could buy any house anywhere in Tampa with no questions asked, and the local Civic Associations would bake me a cake, too.)

Everybody hates the poor, but no one wants to do anything about poverty. Better jobs at better wages? Educational opportunity? Vocational training? Accessible, livable, affordable housing near the better jobs? Decent public transportation for those who can't afford to keep cars on the road? Fuck that noise, that shit costs the working taxpayer money! Buy a fuckin' Lotto ticket like everyone else, you loser, and in the meantime, cook me my damned McNuggets and shut the hell up.

Of course it's much more complex than this. Our current model of government on every level is one that seeks to 'partner' with private industry. In this particular case, the major financial backer of the downtown renovation is Bank of America, and it's nice of them to step up, too. Yet you can't expect a corporate entity like Bank of America to pony up millions of dollars in investment fees if they're not going to make a healthy profit somewhere down the road, and therefore, it goes without saying that any kind of new commercial development space, be it residential, office, industrial or retail, is going to be at 'market price'.

This is the problem that occurs when government becomes a 'partner' with private enterprise. Profit becomes the major driver, and there is no actual profit in helping people. No one in their right mind wants to market housing to the poor. (In fact, down here, no affluent businessman wants to market anything to the poor. People would far rather have 1 affluent client/customer than 100 poor clients/customers, because the affluent fellow is better behaved.)

Government is not supposed to be about making profits, it's supposed to be about making the world a better place for its entire constituency... or, at least, the majority of its constituency. Yet as long as government continues to give tax breaks to its wealthiest constituents, it will continue to be cash strapped; as long as it continues to be cash strapped it will continue to have to 'partner' with private industry to get anything done, and as long as it has to partner with private industry, its programs and products will end up primarily benefitting the affluent who aren't paying much in the way of taxes to start with.

(What the affluent are paying for, in the end, is the condos that the government has brokered the deal to put up in the downtown area in the first place. However, in the meantime, the poor, who aren't going to get to live downtown, are the primary payers of the salaries of the government folks who are putting in 60 hour work weeks brokering these deals, that will revitalize a downtown that most of the taxpayers won't ever get to actually reside in, or in any way benefit from.)

Government needs to stop partnering with the affluent and start taxing the living fuck out of them... and then building people like me some affordable apartments, and funding a decent public transit system, and jacking up the minimum wage, and implementing a workable universal health care system.

Of course, none of this is going to happen any time soon, but it's not my fault. I voted for Ralph.

* * * *

Heh. Yes. A registered Florida voter, and yes, I did vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 elections. So, yes, it's all MY fault. And you people thought I was powerless...